Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Pondering the taxing of my Afro…

This bitch sure as shit didn’t qualify for the Bush tax cuts…hell, I don’t know anyone who did (wince). But it appears that McCain has latched onto the notion of making those tax cuts permanent and that he is also embracing Bushish logic to explain why he thinks that bullshit is a good idea.McCain wants to make the tax cuts permanent because he claims that their existence is critical to stimulating our economy. He also believes that not renewing those tax cuts for folks making over $250,000 per year (daaaaaaaaamn, that’s a lot of cabbage) after they expire in a few years is a tax increase.

Blink.

Gawd, that sounds Rovian as a motherfucker!

Shit, a bitch just got a mental flash of Karl doing his best Edgar Bergen with his hand up the ass of McCain in the role of Charlie McCarthy.

Wince.

Anyhoo, all I know is that my Afro is being taxed more than the Afros of those bringing in a hell of a lot more money than this bitch.

So a bitch has a question…if helping people who make over $250,000 a year keep their money is critical to our economy…and the rest of us can just go fuck ourselves twice on payday…then why the fuck send stimulus checks out to the masses?

Why not just send stimulus checks to those people making $250,000 or more so that they can get their critical whatever-the-fuck-it-is-that-they-do-with-all-that-cash-instead-of-paying-taxes spending on?

***cue crickets***

Fuck.

On a positive note, the price of living simply has gone up just enough for people to question paying politicians a salary. Mayhap the real economic solution is to pay them a small base salary with incentive bonuses to be paid out when they do their damn job?

Sigh.

Or maybe the social climate has finally arrived for me to break out my proposal for the ABB Constitutional Amendment to Ban Bullshit and the Fucking Over of the Masses for the Benefit of the Few and also Federally Protect the Sanctity of Keeping Shit Real...

12 comments:

SquareWhiteDude
said...

Hey just found your blog, love it.

Question for ya re: taxes and breaks - don't you have to actually pay taxes before yours can be cut? I mean, it you're not making any money, you're not paying any taxes, right? So why complain if you don't get any back?

Post up how much you're making and how much you paid this past year, then tell us how much you expect back as a % of that. Then we can have a real conversation about taxes.

I'll keep my income (and why doesn't it surprise me that a square white dude would question that I have one right off the bat?) and my average as hell so totally screwed tax bracket between myself and The Man.

Even if you don't have enough of an income to pay income taxes, you pay sales and property taxes. Both of those take significant bites out of non-rich people's incomes, but I don't see anyone jumping up to offer sales taxes relief on anything except gas, which we should be using less of.

SQ WH Dude, when it's all said & done, the very rich pay ~ same, %-wise, of gross income, as anybody else. Maybe. If their tax people have less-than-average creativity, or more-than-average scruples . By my own figuring ,using various US Gummint #s, as of ~ 5 yrs ago, somewhere between 1/5 & 1/3 of the economy goes untaxed , mostly in offshore tax-free havens . Look up the highest CEO pay , in various industries . How many of them have their nominal headquarters in Hamilton, Bahamas, and similar? So....... who do you suppose is getting most of that tax-free $? Then there's all the my-lobbying-cash-is-very-well-spent "discounts" & "rebates"-through-no-bid-contracts,etc....... ;)

You know what we should pay politicians? MINIMUM WAGE. That way, if they want to improve their own paychecks, they have to improve the paychecks of most of the poorest folks in America. And isn't that what they're supposed to be doing in the first place? Increasing the quality of life for their fellow americans?

This is copied and pasted, and not mine, but it is a perfect illustration:

I was having lunch with one of my favorite clients last week and the conversation turned to the government's recent round of tax cuts.

'"I'm opposed to those tax cuts," the retired college instructor declared, "because they benefit the rich. The rich get much more money back than ordinary taxpayers like you and me and that's not fair.'"

"But the rich pay more in the first place," I argued, "so it stands to reason that they'd get more money back."

I could tell that my friend was unimpressed by this meager argument. So I said to him, "let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand."

"Suppose that every day 10 men go to a restaurant for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If it was paid the way we pay our taxes, the first four men would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1; the sixth would pay $3; the seventh $7; the eighth $12; the ninth $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59."

The 10 men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20." Now dinner for the 10 only costs $80. The first four are unaffected. They still eat for free. Can you figure out how to divvy up the $20 savings among the remaining six so that everyone gets his fair share? The men realize that $20 divided by 6 is $3.33, but if they subtract that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being paid to eat their meal.

The restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percentage, being sure to give each a break, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so now the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of $59.

Outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20," complained the sixth man, pointing to the tenth, "and he got $7!"

"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!"

"That's true," shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor."

Then, the nine men surrounded the tenth man (the richest one, paying the most) and beat him up. The next night the richest man didn't show up for dinner, so now the nine men sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They were $52 short!

"And that, boys, girls and college instructors, is how America's tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table any more. There are lots of good restaurants in Switzerland and the Caribbean."